


Living Between the Walls

by PontiusHermes



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Accident, Circle, Death, Gen, Grief, Spencer dies, Support, Team supporting each other, reason, walls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-26 16:57:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5012584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PontiusHermes/pseuds/PontiusHermes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a mindless and tragic accident, the BAU try to cope with the loss of one of their own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living Between the Walls

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading this. This is my first prose fanfic work ever, so it's probably rubbish, but here goes...  
> If you have any comments/suggestions please use comment section! :)
> 
> Pontius

With such a dramatic line of work, one would expect a spectacular or heroic death from an FBI agent. But Spencer Reid was killed by a drunk driver who, overcompensating, veered onto the footpath that Reid walked every night to get home. While the inebriated motorist collected himself enough to call 911, Spencer spent three minutes pinned between the car bonnet and a wall, chest crushed, unable to breathe. It was just over two minutes before the frenzied stirring of his chest ceased and he hungered for oxygen no more. By the time paramedics arrived Doctor Reid had been dead for nigh on eleven minutes. The breeze carried the shrieking of the sirens away.

In the weeks afterwards, Hotch went through his motions with a tormenting weight of guilt in his eyes, as though he personally had served that driver his last few drinks. Rossi watched his incessant and unrelenting sorrow, not knowing how or which words or actions could reach him. He reflected obsessively on the particular order that things are meant to happen in this life. The youngest were always meant to die last.

Prentiss thought it was funny that a man who in his life had been so important in his own inconspicuous way would in the end die for something so meaningless. In his death there was no reason, no bigger picture or symbolism or deliberateness. Only carelessness, mistakes, alcohol. Then she thought 'funny' might not be the right word. No, there was nothing funny about any of this. Nothing.

Rossi leaned on the door-frame, listening to the sound of dry sobbing. Hotch was slumped at the round table, head in his hands. The desolation of his position, all alone in the darkened room made Rossi sigh with concern. He hesitated -- it didn't seem as though Hotch was particularly looking for company -- and went softly to him, gently taking a seat in one of the adjacent chairs and wondering what on earth he could say. Hotch started and looked sharply up, and Rossi returned his gaze with a gentle calmness. He wondered whether leading Hotch into a conversation about his youngest ex-agent might break down a few of the walls the both of them had erected after his death. 'Reid amazed me,' he said simply, and the walls caved in around them.

JJ was first to find them. Mildly concerned when she realised that the two of them were missing, she knew that finding them would ease her concern that they too had been… hurt. She also knew that in the end a euphemism made people no less dead, and that using one with oneself was nonsensical, but for a moment it seemed as though even that little word helped. Upon hearing the sound of their voices, she was drawn into the room by descriptions and anecdotes that brought her semi-suppressed memories to an ephemeral and bittersweet life. She found a space on Hotch's other side.

Slowly, in search of one or another of their colleagues, Prentiss, Morgan and Garcia found their way to the dark room. Nobody turned on the lights -- it didn't seem proper. Their circle was as complete as they could ever expect it to be, and Rossi knew that they could all feel it. Talk didn't mask the pain in anyone's eyes, and their laughter, though it came often enough, had a melancholy tinge. And all the while stories flew around the room, not one of them could bear to remember the most important story, the one that had brought them all there together.

Soon they ran out of things to say, and one by one they lapsed into their own thoughts, staring at their hands clasped in their laps, or at the table. Almost incoherent scraps of prayers began to bloom up from within the circle; pleas and bargains and questions that no longer had meaning. Prayers from people who saw every day the evidence that there is no God, but who knew they needed prayers anyway. Rossi, from his seat between Hotch and Prentiss, thought they looked like a séance circle, a solemn group waiting for the spirit of Spencer Reid to appear. He watched them become more and more distant from each other, cutting themselves off, folding in on themselves -- with everyone there it was harder not to see who and what was missing. He watched them collect themselves, rebuild their walls for the onslaught of life and lock away their memories as treasures. He watched them leave to attempt to cope on their own, to lock themselves in the prisons of their minds. But he knew that even the largest walls crumble in time, and that those both of mind and matter will turn to dust in the end.


End file.
